Politicians blame renewable energy for South Australia’s freak blackout

THE finger-pointing has already begun in the wake of South Australia’s statewide blackout. One supposed culprit keeps getting mentioned.

FINGER pointing has begun over South Australia’s statewide blackout, and renewable energy is fast becoming the primary culprit.

The state, which relies on renewable energy — mainly wind power — for 40 per cent of its power, is at the centre of a political storm since Wednesday’s actual storm saw the state knocked from the electricity grid.

The outage is understood to have been caused when the storm knocked out transmission towers, cutting the frequency to the system.

And while SA Premier Jay Weatherill says the system has nothing to do with state’s reliance on intermittent renewable energy and the recent closure of its last coal-fired power station, political opponents have seized on the issue.

Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce has been accused of “playing politics with a crisis” over blaming the blackout on the state’s reliance on wind power.

“With a strong reliance on wind power there’s an exceptional draw that’s then put on the network from other sources when that wind power is unable to be generated,” the Nationals leader told ABC radio.

“It doesn’t work when there’s no wind, it doesn’t work when there’s excessive wind, and it obviously wasn’t working too well last tonight because they had a blackout.”

Mr Weatherill has been quick to rebuke Mr Joyce’s claims, saying the deputy PM’s comments are at odds with the Coalition government.

“When there’s a crisis, people pull out their agendas. Barnaby Joyce hates wind power and he pulls that out,” Mr Weatherill said.

“It’s inconsistent with the remarks his own federal colleagues made, so we’ve got a split at the centre of federal government.”

Mr Weatherill went on to dismiss Mr Joyce’s remarks as ignorant.

Did renewable energy cause this? Power towers were knocked down in South Australia during the storm. Picture: Debbie Prosser/Facebook

“I’ve been working closely with (Federal Energy Minister) Josh Frydenberg and with the Prime Minister, and we’re on the same page, and you’ve got essentially these ignorant remarks being made by Barnaby Joyce and he hates wind farms, and he decided to play politics with a crisis,” he said.

But the deputy PM wasn’t the only anti-renewables politician to seize on the disaster.

Mr Frydenberg was quick to raise questions over the impact of renewable energy sources, telling ABC’s 7.30 that there were questions to be explored around the virtue of increasing the amount of renewables.

He said the event occurring in the state, where 41 per cent of power is supplied by renewable energy, “does raise questions for the stability of the systems”.

Mr Frydenberg says the statewide blackout is “clearly not adequate” and wants to convene a meeting of the COAG energy council to make sure it never happens again.

“The ramifications are huge for so many people involved,” he said

Independent Senator Nick Xenophon, who has previously supported greater use of renewable energy, has called for an inquiry to ascertain whether SA’s energy mix made it more vulnerable to outage.

“One of the key question that I think needs to be asked is, if we have more thermal generators in play at the time, and a less reliance on intermittent renewable capacity, whether that would have made a difference in terms of the way the system cascaded to a shutdown,” he told ABC radio.

Senator Nick Xenophon has called for an inquiry into SA’s reliance on renewable energy.

“The safest and best thing to do to learn any lessons from this is a robust, independent analysis. We could start with the Australian Energy Market Commission, and that will, I think, give us some answers as to whether the energy mix in SA was one that made us more vulnerable.”

The South Australian senator also earned criticism from Mr Weatherill, who said the power system had operated the way it was designed to in the once-in-50-year storm.

“It was a weather event, not a renewable energy event,” the premier said.

One Nation leader Pauline Hanson was also quick to weigh in. The new senator blamed the power loss on “unrealistic Greens and Labor policy to use only renewable energy”, and attached a Wikipedia page to the Facebook post, backing up her argument.

Climate change experts have branded the event a preview of what’s to come.

Energy expert Andrew Stock, a member of the Climate Council, dismissed attempts to blame renewables for the blackout as opportunistic and irresponsible.

“Storms can knock out electricity networks no matter where the power supply is coming from,” he said.

At the time of the blackout, 1000MW of wind power was being fed into the South Australian system.

“The atmosphere is packing much more energy than 70 years ago, which contributes to the increasing intensity of such storms,” Climate Council member Professor Will Steffen said. Intense rainfall was projected to increase in Australia and had already increased at a global level.

“This is a prelude to a disturbing future, and it’s only going to get worse if we don’t address climate change.”

Clean Energy Council policy manager Tom Butler said given the remarkable weather conditions, SA’s weather event could have happened anywhere, “but what was extraordinary was how fast politicians and others tried to use this as an opportunity to pin the situation on renewable energy, before anyone even knew what had happened”.

“We can’t expect everyone to be on board with the move to cleaner sources of energy which is happening across the world, and there are inevitable challenges that need to be addressed,” he wrote in a statement sent to news.com.au.

“But in the middle of a crisis caused by severe storms which took out a lot of massive electricity towers, our politicians should be trying to work together to help get everything back on track rather than blaming each other. We can and should be doing a lot better than this.”

Though he said the cause for the blackout was extreme weather, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull a press conference where he spoke about the SA weather event to criticise “extremely aggressive, extremely unrealistic targets for renewable energy use”.

Reliance on “intermittent renewables” placed different strains and pressures on the electricity grid than traditional baseload power from fossil fuels or hydro, he said.

Mr Turnbull said he would have Mr Frydenberg meet with state leaders to discuss a commitment to national renewable energy targets.

Several sate Labor governments — not just in SA — had set “extremely aggressive, extremely unrealistic” targets for renewable energy use.

“Targeting lower emissions is very important but it must be consistent with energy security,” Mr Turnbull said.

— With AAP

Originally published as Politicians blame renewable energy for South Australia’s freak blackout